


Without you is how I Disappear

by katsukii



Category: Death Note (Anime & Manga)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-29
Updated: 2019-09-29
Packaged: 2020-11-07 15:20:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20819486
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/katsukii/pseuds/katsukii
Summary: Light comes to terms with Ryuzaki's death... Somewhat.





	Without you is how I Disappear

He grips the rim of the porcelain sink and tries to steady his hands.

_Ryuzaki._

  
His arms quiver like near-dead leaves in the wind of a rising storm, just barely clinging to the branches from whence they have sprouted. Everything is as planned, but nothing makes sense. When did the bathroom lights turn off? When did the faucet start dripping water at far too consistent intervals? When did his heart start pounding in his ears so loudly? The discordant thumping is all he can hear, drowning out the raspy wheeze of his labored breathing as the blood swirls in his head; it makes his legs tremble. He is dizzy, and growing dizzier by the second.

Light forces himself to look in the mirror. A haggard face stares back at him, eyes sunken, brows low, a darkness under his lower lids that demonstrates only the beginning of the fatigue in his aching body. Ashes coat his fingertips — or maybe it's sand; he's quite certain only sand can be so coarse — and he brings a hand to his cheek, tracing a delicate grey line over the high, glistening points of his skin. He fancies himself a God, decked out in the flesh-fallings of his conquered enemies. The dark, spotty bars drawn over his cheekbones with the ash are courtesy of Rem, who was so gracious as to die and leave behind her corroded body. Now Light wears it like a badge of honor, a symbol of his holy triumph. And, of course, as the last piece of his old life spent in fear of L.

"I am the God of the New World," he tells himself, and the words taste fantastic rolling off his tongue. But there's a bitterness disguised in them — the one that makes his body convulse in shivers.

_Ryuzaki._

He's dead. Light planned this, but it feels surprising all the same. The clarity, the freedom, the emptiness — they overwhelm his senses. His skin feels like rubber, slipping across the countertop with no friction whatsoever, and he can barely register the chill of the dripping water against his palms as he washes clean the ash residue. His arms are like lead, dragging through space-time as though it were a vat of tar, slowing his every move to a sickening crawl. He hears footsteps at the bathroom entrance; he turns his head sharply and the world whips into view around him, spinning, spinning, stopping. Only what his eyes focus on is clear. The rest of the world is blurry, and he cannot grasp why. It's not the tears — the _tears_? Light has expertise seeing through false tears, but these, these he did not summon. _Why_ are there tears? Why do they burn his cheeks, carving hot paths through the ash? Surely, he thinks, his victory isn't _that_ sweet that tears are appropriate. He should dry up and leave — or maybe it's the perfect guise to operate under, a sad victim of the loss of a dear friend. He shuffles his feet as if to move, but—  
  
But he stalls, turning back to the mirror, touching his own saltwater-streaked face.  
  
And it hits him like a sucker punch to the jaw.

He misses Ryuzaki.

His competition is gone but so is his companion; his fear done away with, but so too is his sport. The only person who could ever push Light's limits is gone, and will never return, no matter how hard he prays or kills or begs Ryuk to help him. Ryuzaki is dead, and Light knows that a part of himself has died with him. The piece of him whose heart fluttered at smiles, the piece whose cheeks scorched with heat whenever Ryuzaki got too close — that is gone forever, disappearing into the nothingness that Ryuzaki's absence creates. Light's favorite part of himself is dead.

All that was once Light is in shambles. As Ryuzaki's memory wanes, so too does Light fade away with him. Kira replaces the spots in Light's mind that Ryuzaki used to occupy, and by the months, he becomes a vengeful man, scheming and plotting with all the gusto of one who has nothing left to lose. And indeed, he is invincible, because all that he cares for is gone.

He hopes that maybe, when his is all said and done, he will get to see Ryuzaki again, and tell him all the things he should've said—

Starting with "I love you."


End file.
